The Eclipse: A Memoir of a Suicide by Antonella Gambotto

"My mind was no more than a shifting tray of shattered crystal, bits of glass, my own teeth may have been amongst the mess."

Novelist Antonella Gambotto was awoken at seven one Saturday morning by a telephone call. She could never have anticipated the subsequent devastation.

The Eclipse: A Memoir of Suicide is astonishing account of one woman's experience of love and loss. Gambotto's insight and compassion are startling; her ability to make sense of suicide, revolutionary. Does any man have the right to dispose of his own life? This is, she writes, the ultimate debate of moral entitlement. She explains the premise of suicide and how it pivots on a fatal logical flaw. Presenting an eloquent case against our understanding of depression and bereavement, she poses a profound question:

If death is a process and not a state, how does that change the experience of grief?

   Arguably the most important memoir ever written about loss, The Eclipse hypnotises the reader from the outset. Gambotto's life s been saturated by death. The first boy who proposed to her shot himself in the head at the age of sixteen. Michael VerMeulen, her great love and the legendary American editor of British GQ, overdosed on cocaine at the age of 38. And then her baby brother, gone. Grief is, she writes, something like coals to be walked upon.

  Passionate and magnificently written, The Eclipse should be given to anyone whose heart has been torn out by loss, and to those who want to love without fear.